3 
With much difficulty, and after an incarceration of several 
weeks, Donne succeeded in obtaining the liberation of himself 
and his friends, to which the following letter, written by 
Christopher Brooke to the Lord Keeper Egerton, may in some 
measure have contributed:— 
May it please your good Lordship, 
“ What mine offence is, being singled out by itself, none can 
better judge than your Honour, who understand what men can 
understand, and justly censure greater every day. And perhaps 
it should be indiscreetly done to offer to your Lordship’s ears, 
(filled necessarily every hour with the complaints of the whole 
realm) such circumstances as might diminish this poor fault of 
mine. Therefore I spare ; yet will be bold, my lord, to say that 
they are as many as those that can be found out to aggravate 
the same. My lord, it was enjoined that I should make some 
submission. I have drawn one out of my heart, and writ it 
with mine own hand, and sent it to his Grace and the rest of 
the commissioners for those causes, wherein I have confessed 
my offence against the canon laws, and constitutions provincial 
of this realm, and have testified my sorrow for the whole fact. 
What other satisfaction I (but such an offender as I am) should 
make, I know not, but I always submit myself. For Sir George 
Moore (my Lord) I knew then neither his person nor his estate, 
much less that worthy favour in wdiich (your Lordship witness) 
he standeth with your Honour. For, my Lord, if I had, 
(unwise as I am), I w^ould have chosen rather to have under¬ 
gone for Mr. Donne some other more apparent danger. And 
pardon me a word for him, my Lord ; w^ere it not now best that 
every-one whom he in any way concerns should become his 
favourer or his friend, who wants (my good Lord) but fortune’s 
hands and tongue to rear him up and set him out? For my 
part, besides these other things, I am held from the sitting at 
York,* already four days since began, where (in my silly fortune, 
such as it is,) my profitablest practice lies. And I protest, my 
Lord, that thereby I am endangered to lose my mother’s favour, 
whom I seem to forsake in her greatest businesses, whose favour 
* After Lis call to the Bar, Brooke Lad joined tLe NortLern Circuit. 
D 2 
